Growing up on border shaped bicultural storyteller

YAKIMA -- It wasn't until his family moved to a San Diego suburb that he heard Tijuana described as a dirty hole and was called those nasty names some people throw around.

"I went to the bathroom and looked for grease stains behind my back," said best-selling novelist Luis Alberto Urrea, recounting the boyhood memory to an audience of several hundred at the Capitol Theatre.

Using humor to soften painful and tragic episodes, the final speaker for this season's Town Hall Lecture Series told his own story Wednesday about growing up bicultural between San Diego and Tijuana.

The series brings four inter-nationally renowned speakers, including journalists, writers and activists, to Yakima each year.

His story is one that many Yakima Valley residents can probably relate to.

Urrea -- whose nonfiction book "The Devil's Highway: A True Story" was a 2004 Pulitzer Prize finalist -- talked about how the Mexico-U.S. border wasn't some abstract, distant thing.

"I write about the border because the border went down the middle of our apartment," said Urrea, who teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

His father was a high-ranking Mexican army official; his American mother grew up in New York City and sold jewelry.

Theirs was a marriage that failed. But Urrea, who was born in 1955, learned to value literature from their "constant war through the arts for my soul."

His mother read Twain and Dickens to him at night in English. His father bought him a Spanish translation of The Odyssey.

There were other factors that drew Urrea to storytelling.

For one, there was his Aunt Flaca, who had a knack for making up spooky explanations for innocent questions -- as in, little blond boys who play in the street will get kidnapped by marijuana growers and become their slaves.

And second, writing in his room was a safe alternative to the outdoors. Part of Urrea's childhood was spent in a poor and violent Mexican barrio in San Diego. His light-colored skin and blond hair made him an easy target for neighborhood bullies.

Life took Urrea on innum-erable turns. After becoming the first person in his family to graduate from college, he spent years interpreting for an American Baptist minister who worked with orphans in Tijuana. He cleaned toilets to make ends meet.

And he wrote about the world around him for years before he published his first book because he found a healing power in storytelling.

"There's a lot more that unites us than separates us," he said in an interview before the speech. "Storytelling opens us in ways ... I'm trying to make art represent the soul in a lasting way."

Recognizing that his success story was an unlikely one -- many of his relatives died in gang violence in Southern California -- Urrea encouraged young people to work hard and stay out of trouble.

"It's hard to do what you need to do to make yourself a success," Urrea said. "But the United States is an amazing country.

"It happens only here. Still only in America."

* Melissa Sánchez can be reached at 509-577-7675 or msanchez@yakimaherald.com.